Tech that every Accountant should be aware of!

Accountants sometimes have this habit of completely disregarding areas of study which is even slightly outside their forte. Therefore if there’s an article on Taxation, every accountant would want to read it however if there’s something on new technology, not many takers. And this has in the past and continues to be a problem with lot of the accountants.

Today we want to talk about some of the technology that every accounting student or professional should know about. Technology that is existent everywhere you would go and in the corporate world it is almost impossible to not know and do without it. Therefore some of the tech that we write about today, please do have a further read on the same to get more proficient. The first is Artificial Intelligence!

Artificial Intelligence - Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions. The term may also be applied to any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind such as learning and problem-solving (source: Investopedia). The way AI works is for e.g. if there was a job in your office that required some cognitive capabilities i.e. making a decision basis some data, then the AI would be able to do that for you. Therefore an insurance company can use an AI to decide whether they would want to give a cover to certain individual basis its eating/living habits, and what amounts if approved. Now this most commonly gets mixed up with Robotics and Process automation which is slightly different from Artificial Intelligence.

 

Robotics and Process automation - Robotics and Process automation (RPA) refers to simple and powerful automation software enabling you to create your own software robots to automate any business process. Your "bots" are configurable software set up to perform the tasks you assign and control. RPA bots can learn. (Source: automationanywhere). Now the RPA though works on similar principles of AI, however one fundamental difference, the work it does has is not necessarily intelligent. Therefore RPA uses software that are able to replicate simple and straight forward tasks which otherwise would take up long hours to complete with humans doing it. Therefore tasks like daily reports, email storing archiving, invoice uploads, download of reports, etc. all of these activities can be easily automated. Since there is no need of high level of decision making or the use of cognitive capabilities, the Bots as they are commonly known as are used to make these processes completely automated.

 

Machine Learning - Machine Learning (ML) is another very commonly used term in the industry today and more and more companies are trying to implement ML in their processes. Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can access data and use it learn for themselves (source: expertsystem). Therefore this is an extension of the Artificial Intelligence wherein the machine not only does decision making, it also learns from its experiences. Therefore the auto text is a very common form of ML wherein the words are automatically suggested by the program in your phones as they know what the most likely next word you’ll use is. As you would have realized, it doesn’t just work on English, it can work on any form of language. The system records what you write on a most regular basis and uses that to give you suggestions when you write the next time around. Now the ML is being used extensively by customer service companies to make sure the customer experience is improved phenomenally. 

Above are some of the most used or sort after technology that is being used in the industry today and as an accountant it is extremely important for all of you to know and be updated with the latest trends. There are multiple sites that are there where you can learn AI and RPA, like automation anywhere or UI Path, etc. which can give you a lot more details of these technologies. Happy learning!